What Are We Ready To Risk? Academia, Advocacy, and Activism (Video)

Over the weekend, Fordham University Center for Ethics Education Postdoctoral Fellow and Program Administrator for the Adolescent Scientific Access Project Dr. Mimi Arbeit graduated from Tufts University with a Ph.D. in Child Study and Human Development, and served as the student speaker for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Doctoral Hooding Ceremony.

Morgan Colladowrites:Support for trans women dwindles when we are still alive… It points to who is valuable and who is disposable. If you’re not a trans woman… think long and hard about the ways that you’re supporting trans women in your community. Do you see trans women in public community spaces? How are your actions pushing them out?

But these systems are built to maintain themselves.As PhDs, we are pronounced producers of knowledge. We can use our position within the system – and the peer-reviewed knowledge that we produce – to advocate for change. That’s our professional work; activism is the personal work. But activism, solidarity, is risky. I want a job, tenure, grants, clout. I want those things for myself and for my advocacy – I am building power and building knowledge with hope that I can leverage my power and my knowledge to make a difference.

These systems are built to maintain themselves. And I am a part of that.But these systems are not okay. We need an end to business as usual, and we all need to commit to that end, as knowledge-producers and as human beings, each situated at various sites of power, within White Capitalist Heteropatriarchy.

So now that our degrees are not on the line anymore, what are we ready to risk?